Dawn Walton, MSc.Psych,DipCHyp,MNLP,MBPsS

Exam time is tough time of year for our kids. The stress may be more than anything they have had to deal with before and it tears us apart. I know we are desperate to help them through it. 

So here are my tips for things you can do to help them.

1. Get them to listen to my specially developed relaxation track.

Click here to go and fetch my specially recorded relaxation track. This will help get their mind in a more positive place. It is only 9 minutes long and is an mp3 file so they can just go and sit somewhere quietly and benefit from relaxing. This will get them in a good place for building an anchor.

2. Build them an anchor.

An anchor is a physical trigger to an emotion. It can be a good or a bad thing but we can make a deliberate effort to create a positive anchor. How useful would it be to get that feeling of calm to call on during an exam?

For exams we can also be a little bit clever because we know the peppermint helps with recollection and memory. So here’s my suggestion

• Spend some time talking to your kid about a time when they felt calm and happy. Talk about all the details. The sounds, smells, colours etc of that memory. You want to get them to a stage where if you ask them to rate the intensity on a scale of 1-10 where 10 is the most, they say 8+.
• If they are struggling to get to 8, ask “if there was something you could do to make it more intense, what would that be”
• When they are at 8+ get them to sniff the peppermint oil.

If they take the peppermint oil to the exam, all they will need to do is to sniff it to get that feeling of calm

3. Remember people learn differently

We all learn differently. Some of us need to see things in front of us to understand them. Others need to hear it and others need it to be tangible, to feel it. People who learn by hearing may find that listening to music while they study helps them retain information. My husband used to listen to Madness. All he had to do in an exam was recall the appropriate Madness song and he recalled the stuff for the exam! If you are visual you might need to go wild with a highlighter pen, write your own notes etc. And some of us need to understand things so depending on the exam maybe you can let your kid explain it to you.

The point is – don’t yell at them for playing music because they may well need it to learn!